Marion Cotillard gives life to character in Rust and Bone'

Marion Cotillard is far from a household name in America. But in her native France, she’s acting royalty.

And why not? When she earned an Oscar in 2007 for playing Edith Piaf in “La Vie En Rose,” she became the first — and, so far, only — actor to win an Academy Award for a French-language performance.

The Oscar helped raise Cotillard’s profile in Hollywood, too. Over the last few years, she has nabbed juicy roles in major movies, including Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” Woody Allen’s “Midnight In Paris” and Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” and “The Dark Knight Rises.” But, she says, she’ll never get over feeling anxious about acting — and that’s just the way she likes it.

“When I start working on a movie, I feel like I’m a beginner again,” she explains. “It’s always the same. I’m (nervous). Of course, I have more experience now, but because I love to jump into the unknown each time, it’s like starting all over again.”

Advertisement

The less confident Cotillard is, the happier she becomes.

“I love it when I’m not sure if I’m going to be good. I love it when I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to give life (to a character) and find the authenticity.”

Cottilard’s latest, the Jacques Audiard-directed “Rust and Bone” (opening Friday) is drenched in authenticity. The actress, whose intense performance makes her a likely Oscar contender, plays Stephanie, an orca trainer at Marineland in Antibes, France, who suffers an accident that results in the loss of both of her legs from the knee down.

Angry and depressed even before the incident, Stephanie begins a downward spiral that is halted by her relationship with the troubled Ali (Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts), a boxer struggling to make enough money to support himself and his young son.

When she first read the screenplay by Audiard (“The Prophet”) and Thomas Bidegain, which they based on a collection of stories by Canadian writer Craig Davidson, Cottilard was excited by the enormous challenges the role presented.

“Usually when I read a script and I love the story, I feel a strong connection with the characters,” says the actress. 37. “But with Stephanie, she was totally mysterious to me. When I finished the script, I was, like, ‘I don’t know who she is.’

“And that’s what I told Jacques. I was kind of scared he would freak out that the actress he wanted to work with didn’t really understand the character ... But even after making the movie, she’s still a mystery. I realize that part of her will stay a mystery and that’s OK.”

At the beginning of the movie, Stephanie is a club-hopper who uses drugs and alcohol to numb her loneliness and pain. She’s going down a dark path and, in some ways, the accident helps her move back toward the light.

“I think she was an empty shell and then suddenly life, in a very violent, powerful way, gets back into her,” says Cottilard.

For all of the scenes following Stephanie’s accident, Cotillard’s legs were digitally distorted so she appears, rather shockingly, to be a double amputee. With the exception of wearing green, knee-high socks to make it easier for the digital artists to erase her limbs, she wasn’t required to do anything particularly taxing on set.

“The team who worked on special effects were super talented, super fast and super discrete,” she says.

While Cottilard spent time with whale trainers in order to understand their mindset, she resisted interviewing women who had lost the use of their legs.

“I think it would have been different if I had to play someone who’d been handicapped for 10 years,” she says. “Maybe then I would have worked differently and prepared the character differently. But I thought this is totally new for her so it’s going to be new for me and I’m going to learn with her.”

One of the most moving scenes in the movie is a simple sequence of the wheelchair-bound Stephanie sitting on the balcony of her apartment, pretending like she’s back at Marineland, signaling her beloved whales.

“That scene obsessed me days after we had shot it,” says the actress who grew up in Paris, the daughter of two stage actors. “I thought it was so brilliant. She’s coming back to life, coming back to being a woman who ... flesh and bones and blood and heart.”

At its core, “Rust and Bone” is a romance between two people who never would fall in love under normal circumstances. Not surprisingly, one of keys to the film’s success is the interplay between Cottilard and Schoenaerts, who pass the chemistry test with flying colors.

Cottilard remembers meeting Schoenaerts for the first time at Audiard’s house and being struck by his good looks.

“I saw him and I didn’t expect such a magnificent, tall guy,” she says. “And then he started to read (the script) and I was, like, ‘Where does this guy come from? Where has be been all these years?’”

“Sometimes you meet someone and there’s this feeling that you’ve known this person forever, like a brother. It was like that with Matthias.”

Cottilard and Schoenaerts hit it off so well, in fact, that their intense love scene was not as big of a chore to shoot as it could have been.

“It’s weird because I usually hate doing love scenes,” says the actress. “I hate it so much with anybody. But, in this movie, it was totally different. Not that I loved doing it but — and this may sound weird but I’m going to say it anyway — I was so happy for my character to have this experience, to be a woman again, that it was kind of easy to do.

“And Matthias and Jacques were very respectful. The scene was one of the hearts of this movie. Without it, we would have missed something. “

In the past, Cottilard has spoken about how deeply she’s been affected by roles, particularly Édith Piaf, whose tragic story she couldn’t shake for a good eight months after production wrapped. But after filming “Rust and Bone” every day, the actress would spend her nights holed with her partner, French filmmaker Guillaume Canet, and their newborn son.

“In a totally organic manner, when I went home to the hotel after shooting ‘Rust and Bone,’ I had my baby, and suddenly the separation between my life on set and off the set was very easy to make,” she recently told The New York Times. “Because at the time he was about 5 months old, he was a tiny little baby who needed me entirely, not me and my work.”

Cottilard recently finished filming a Canet-directed movie called “Blood Ties,” which will co-star Schoenaerts as well as Clive Owen and Mila Kunis. With that thriller in the can awaiting release, she plans to spend the next six months at home in Paris.

“My life is movement, constant movement,” she says. “And I love it but sometimes you just need to relax and not work too much. I want to see my son every day of my life. I want to do nothing but stare at him.”